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August 25, 2008. xNormal 3.16.0 has been released. |
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I finally added RSS 2.0 feed support for the web. Hurrayy! Click on the right icon, using your web browser's RSS autodiscover or over the RSS big letters on the web's main menu.
Also added permalinks for each page's news ( the small blue and white arrows ). |
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Added an option to disable the tiles's updating in the preview window ( to gain some
speed ). Also added a new map type ( the ray direction map ).
By popular demand, xNormal no longer uses adaptive sampling. It was hard to configure
and the final quality suffered a lot.
Improved a bit the quad face support and optimized the loading times ( specially
for the .OBJ importer ).
Added an option to re-topologize two meshes using tangent space normal maps to avoid
seams ( "the base texture is a tangent space normal map" checkbox in the high resolution
mesh list ). |
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Added a new GPGPU map renderer based on the excellent NVIDIA CUDA 2 techonology to accelerate
the ray tracing mechanism ( I plan to extend it to other areas too ).
Although the renderer it's not very optimized yet, the results are very promising:
As you can see beats the SIMD-packet software ray tracer by a big margin.
The complete charts are HERE
You can test it using these NVIDIA beta drivers(177.35) with CUDA2 support ( the official ones don't support CUDA 2 yet ): Download CUDA 2.0 beta drivers
To see if your graphics card is supported by CUDA 2 you can go to this NVIDIA's CUDA-enabled GPU list web page.
Notice the CUDA 2 map renderer currently can generate normal maps only... but it
will be able to render all the map types in a near future.
Also solved a lot of bugs
( including the AA pixelization inherited from the 3.15.X versions, fixed the cone map tool, etc... ). |
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June 27, 2008. New tutorial. |
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Anton Kozlov made a good video tutorial about generating normal maps with xNormal
using an object exported from ZBrush. |
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June 1, 2008. xNormal 3.15.2 released. |
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A small patch:
Added an option to the "render wireframe and ray fails" to display UV seams. This
is specially good to detect tangent-space problems.
Solved some bugs ( incorrect mesh clear, a crash when you set the sampling minAA=1
/ maxAA=1 crash, etc... ). |
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May 25, 2008. xNormal 3.15.1 released. |
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Now you can render three new map types:
- Wireframe and CW uv face map.
- Ray fails map.
- Cavity map. |
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Added 3dsmax 2009 support.
Also added a 3dsmax SBM importer. |
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Added global illumination and radiance in the realtime ray tracing graphics driver.
Also improved the rasterization precision ( which is very noticeable while rendering
the ambient occlusion ).
Added a new technology to default renderer to prevent seams. I want to thank
Morten Mikkelsen for all his help with it. |
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Finally, solved some bugs. By the way, if you use the old 3.15.0 better delete it...
It used a buggy normals compression that could cause small but noticeable artifacts
in the tangent basis. |
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April 18, 2008. xNormal 3.14.6 released. |
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Improved a bit the user interface with things like:
- Multiple selections
- Drag and drop
- Autoassign cages
- Button to clear meshes
Also made the preview window bigger. |
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Solved some bugs with the NVIDIA GeForce 7 series cards with the OpenGL graphics
driver. I was running out of interpolators and texture units due to the complexity
of some shaders... so they were restructured to use less instructions and registers. |
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Solved problems with multiple monitors.
Now is possible to specify if you want to use Dualview / MultiMon or not. |
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Added a new and interesting feature to harden the vertex normals. In that way the
vertex normals will be set equal to the face's normal. Somebody told me that could
be useful to avoid beveling for hard-edged objects like a cube.
And, to finish, fixed several minor bugs. |
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April 13, 2008. New tutorial about ambient occlusion/cavity. |
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Donald Phan has made an excellent tutorial
about ambient occlusion and cavity maps using xNormal.
You can find more info on the tutorials section or directly HERE |
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April 4, 2008. xNormal 3.14.5 released. |
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Added a gamma correction option to the DX10 graphics driver.
Corrected the DX10 tone map operator to be more sensible to the exposure.
Added some ambient cubemap probes donated by Håkan Persson based on Devebec's lighting
probes.
Solved more bugs. |
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Match 29, 2008. xNormal 3.14.4 released.
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Improved the DX10 graphics driver with screen-space ambient occlusion ( SSAO ).
Here is a video showing the effect. Notice you can control the AO radius, bright
and also the bias to solve self occlusion problems.
It runs very fast and it's taking 64 samples.
Currently is only available in the DX10 graphics driver, but will be ported soon
to the DX9 and OpenGL drivers too. The technique can be ported very easy and could
be used for dynamic scenes too.
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Added a fake'n'fast indirect-lighting feature. Added a new example, the
Cornell box scene, to show the global illumination effect.
Gonnal try to improve it much more soon.
Enhaced a bit the quality of the ray tracing realtime graphics driver too. Now runs
at the same speed than the previous adaptive version but at much more resolution.
Also recompiled the program to use SSE (
you'll notice a small 5-10% speed increase ). Expect even more speed improvements in future versions.
Some bugs were corrected too. |
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Match 11, 2008. Maya normal map tutorial. |
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Added a new video tutorial about how
to visualize correctly the normal maps created from xNormal in the Maya's realtime
viewport.
More information in the tutorials section. |
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February 24, 2008. xNormal v3.14.3 released. |
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Now you can specify secondary and tertiary light colors to simulate multiple lights
in the 3D viewer. Although this is a trick
I think it works very well !
Added more control to the fine detail. Now you can use the scale factor to control
the elavation of the height map and also to specify the heights-to-normals algorithm.
Some minor bugs were solved too. |
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February 9, 2008. xNormal v3.14.2 released. |
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Now you can specify the "smooth normals" option for the highpoly meshes ( why I
didn't put this option before? ).
Added a "mesh scale" option in the Simple AO GPU tool.
The DX9 graphics driver now uses less VRAM to store the normal maps.
Corrected some minor bugs. |
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January 28, 2007. xNormal 3.14.1 released. |
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Added a DX10 graphics driver with HDRI,
improved bloom effect and sightly better soft shadows.
Of course, DX10 runs only in Vista... so if you use WinXP this driver will be ignored.
I plan to make new graphics drivers with more advanced effects once OpenGL 3.1 is
available ( so you could execute it on Windows 2k/XP )... and perhaps I could improve
a bit the DX9 and OGL ones in the future.
These are some of the features of the new DX10 graphics driver: |
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Improved glow and HDR support |
Multisample antialiasing transparency support |
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By the way, i'm looking for a new example
showing all these new features... so if you wanna donate some scene I will be very
pleased, thx! |
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Added an useful text information in
the 3D viewer: the maximum cage distance. You can measure better uniform ray distances
and height limits just going to the "edit cages" mode and looking at the text's
value.
The height map rendering no longer requires to enter manually the min/max ray length
in the options dialog. Now uses the cage as limit or the const uniform ray distances
on the highpoly mesh list. |
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Finally, solved some bugs ( including
a crash in the Simple AO GPU tool when loading files with more than one mesh inside
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January 18, 2007. xNormal 3.14.0 released. |
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Added
Luxology Modo, Nevercenter Silo
and
Geomview mesh importers.
Also solved some bugs in the Ogre importer ( flipped UVs and tangent basis data ). |
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Solved several bugs in the PLY mesh importer.
The PLY, OBJ and ASE mesh importers now consume less memory. Used the Stanford's mesh
collection with 1,5Gb of RAM to test. The Lucy mesh ( 116M points, 40M polygons ) was loaded
without problems with that amount of memory.
The realtime ray tracing graphics driver has been optimized to manage big meshes
better. |
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Added per-vertex ambient occlusion computation in the simple GPU AO tool.
This is good because you don't need to UV-map the mesh... and can be used in the
traditional AO rendering to accelerate the highpoly-lowpoly projection a lot!
The 3D viewer was adapted to show the per-vertex-AO in both highres and lowpoly
mesh models.> |
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Changed completely the rendering system to make it more efficient and to consume
less RAM. Now uses a "bucket" approach.
Now is possible to render 4k x 4k maps with full antialiasing without problems.
The new adaptive sampling render system allows to generate the
maps faster when you enable antialiasing. A diagnostics option has been added to
see visually the sampling density.
Modified the preview window to show the realtime progress of the render. |
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To finish,
the maps baked don't use the alpha channel anymore. Now you can use "paste"
or to enter
manually a path in the file boxes.
Some bugs were corrected too. |
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January 3, 2007. New tutorial. |
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Added a new tutorial with a trick to use the 3.14.0's
Simple GPU AO tool to compute per-vertex occlusion and to render the traditional
highpoly-lowpoly projective ambient map faster.
In this tutorial you can see the basic functionality of this tool. You will need
Adobe's Flash Player to see it. |
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December 2, 2007. Visits and downloads count. |
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Weee! Today this page reached 3M visits and almost 1M downloads!
Thanks to all the people who downloaded the application and also to the contributors
who make xNormal better! |
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November 2, 2007. Blog. |
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Just want to remind you that I usually put future plans and some comments in my
blog http://santyhammer.blogspot.com .
Feel free to visit it and read about the upcoming xNormal versions! |
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November 6, 2007. xNormal v3.12.0 released. |
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Added PRT-p and PRT-n map rendering support for the upcoming game Wing Commander
Vega Strike .I want to thank Dan Watkins and Claudio Freire
for all their help with this new amazing GI technique! |
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Probably the most exciting changes
are these two:
A fully-GPU-accelerated ambient occlusion generator tool! Very simple to use and 100x faster
than the typical one. Its speed surprised me. Baked the smiley example at 1024x1024
and 128 samples in... less than one second! And all this with a cheap 70$ GeForce
8500!
Also added a cone mapping tool ( improved parallax effect ). I wanna thank Jonathan "lonesock" Dummer and Fabio Policarpo for their help. |
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I included an experimental 100% software
raytracing graphics driver.
It's still on "alpha" state... its performance is not very good but.. hey,
is a start! and is not at all optimized! I think is good also for the people without graphics card because is
able to run in 100% software mode ( it does not require OpenGL/D3D or any hardware ).
Did a new example to show the raytraced reflections. |
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Added 3dsmax 2008 support for the .SBM mesh exporter. |
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Also added a video recorder inside
the interactive 3D viewer. Just press F9 to toggle it.
You can save a video file with your mesh models while the camera is rotating,
you can record the normal mapping effect when light moves, to make demo reels easy, etc...
It's possible to select the video codec to use. I added the wonderful XViD MPEG4 encoder
to the xNormal install package... so you can select it to make nice demo reels. |
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Added an Ogre engine mesh importer/exporter
thanks to
Paul Cheyrou-Lagrèze and
Steve Streeting. Currently are in "alpha"
state but can read/write well the Ogre binary mesh format ( the XML one in a near
future... ).
The Ogre importer/exporter source code is provided in the xNormal SDK in case you want to expand it
or to collaborate on its development. |
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Corrected many OpenGL problems with the Radeon HD 2XXX cards ( white shadows, crashes, etc...)
Improved PLY compatibility ( now xNormal can read well the Standford's mesh collection
).
Added a new normal map - to - cavity map method: The EMBoss one ( I think it gives
very good results ). Also added a new method to compute height - to - occlusion
map.
Corrected tons of minor bugs ( including one related to AO computation that was
making it much more slow than should be! ) and polished some small details. |
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